Mobile communication devices are often capable of performing many different functions. For instance, such devices may support any of a variety of applications, such as a telephone application, a video conferencing application, an e-mail application, an instant messaging application, a blogging application, a digital camera application, a digital video camera application, a web browsing application, a digital music player application, and/or a digital video player application, and so on. A design assumption is that the user can be fully trusted and is given full authority over the device.
However, in many cases, the role of the device user is different from the role of the device owner or responsible party. Often the devices are given by an owner or more generally, any party that is responsible for the given device, to some end user. For instance, a parent may give a mobile communication device to a teenager, and a corporate or government manager may assign a mobile communication device to his or her employee. In one particular example, parents often give over their devices to a child to play a game or other entertaining activity. While using the device, children can easily exit out of a given application and access anything else (i.e. email, file stores, internet, etc.).
Parental controls exist for devices such as televisions and computers. For example, parental-control applications may allow a parent to monitor and control the content a child may access over the Internet. However, traditional parental-control applications may focus on web content (e.g., monitoring and blocking websites) and chat activity (monitoring conversations and blocking buddies). More generally, traditional parental-control applications roughly fall into four categories: content filters, which limit access to age-appropriate content, usage controls, which constrain the usage of these devices such as placing time-limits on usage or forbidding certain types of usage, computer usage management tools, which allow parents to enforce learning time into child computing time, and monitoring, which can track location and activity when using the devices.